We all stared at Sneed. Again he started the deep, hiccupping breaths. Finally Tucker broke the silence. “I heard all that, but it don’t mean shit to me, Buckwheat. None of it. Never will.”
Sneed’s eyes blurred as his own air rose to choke him. The movie star put a boot on the boat’s prow. He took a last look at Aretha. “Let it go, troupers,” he told his skinheads, and he kicked us out into the current.
“You all have a nice couple of days,” Dane Tucker said.
A Million Pounds of Warer
“For the record,” I began, after an hour of rage and rumination, after maybe three miles of wide and sluggish water, “I think Aretha is a damn fine name.”
“Well,” she retorted, “I think that we’re screwed.”
“Oh, we were screwed a long time ago. Now we just know how.” I took an oar stroke. “You know what my real name is? Ned. Can you believe that? Ned Oglivie. Now that is an example of what a name should never be.”
Aretha feigned interest, barely: “And that’s why you’re Dog then?”
“Almost.”
“What would you rather be?”
“I don’t know. Ike. Elvis. Satchmo. Carlos.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Go on. You think I haven’t heard it all?”
“I mean it. Aretha. That is a kick-ass name.”
“Next,” she said, “you’re gonna tell me how sexy it is.”
“Well, I could.” I performed an oar-shrug. “If it would brighten your day.”
She squashed that with an angry frown. “What would brighten my day right now is some kind of damn plan.”
I had been watching the sky.
“Okay,” I said. “You want a plan? Here it is.”
By means of stubby oar I maximized our speed through another five miles of river as meanwhile the temperature dropped twenty degrees under storm clouds and the Roam grew brawny and rough. Around us, the diorama had flipped by the quarter-mile: a searing jackpine scree became a shadow-cool matrix of angular volcanic stone, and that became a gusty plateau of brown bristlegrass, and now, as Aretha clawed at goosebumps on her arms, we plunged at a quickened pace toward a canyon where the river pitched and frothed beneath bulking thunderheads. “Here,” I said just inside the mouth of the canyon, and I pulled us over where the river split around an island of rock rimmed with drifted wood and brushed with hawthorn and buffaloberry. Tucker’s man, watching from horseback on the canyon rim, stopped with us.
Aretha did her part, collecting firewood while I hiked ahead along the treacherous riverbank to scout the X-factor of the canyon. It didn’t look too bad, I decided. It looked dangerous but not impossible to navigate in the dark. Our plan was to light a fire and keep it burning a good hour or two into darkness, then build it up and leave it ablaze, holding our minder on the ridge while we slipped downriver, hopefully invisible, all the way to Sneed’s mark on the map by dawn. With the heavy clouds—maybe even better with a storm—it was going to be dark dark at the bottom of the canyon. Our minder would never see us, never guess we’d gone.
I said when I returned, “You know what they say about the weather in Montana?”
“No, Hoss, I don’t.”
“You don’t like it, just wait a few minutes.” Aretha dropped a heap of sun-bleached pine branches. “That’s the same thing they say about the weather in Arkansas.”
“Well, see, we’re all one people.”
“Mm-hmm.” She moved off to collect more wood. “United by bullshit about the weather.”
We raised the blaze to about six feet high sometime after midnight and then shoved off. Sneed lay as instructed in the bottom of the boat, half aware and three-quarters confused. Aretha twisted her arms through the side ropes and hung on. In this manner, graced by lucky bounces and timely spins, we endured a five-mile sequence of minor rapids and emerged an hour before a stormy daybreak into a long riffle, a smooth and speeding bullet train of water.
“We made it.” Aretha yawned, shook the kinks out of her arms. “Good call, Hoss.”
I didn’t answer. I wasn’t sure yet. The speed of the water was new, beyond my capacity to control the boat. I kept my eyes front. Overhead I felt the pressure of a storm about to break loose. I saw the next big rapids, felt its yank beneath me, just as thunder cracked and finally the rain came down.
“Hang on!” I shouted.
I back-oared, trying to slow us down and get a look ahead.
“Get him to hold something! Or sit on him, and you hold on! I think we can make this.”
But in the downpour I could barely see beyond Aretha, and this new current felt like a knife blade under the boat that wanted to peel us up and flip us aside into the rocks.
I bent an oar. “Damn it!”
Aretha screamed as we hit a rock and spun one-eighty, giving her the view ahead as we sluiced into the rapid. She screamed again, sat down hard on her son and clutched the gunwale rope. I tucked the oars rather than lose them completely. This was a new game. This was pinball for our lives. “Two hands, everybody! Hang on!”
The boat bounced and spun. Lightning showed me sandstone cliffs collapsed to a thirty-yard span, with Cruise Master-sized slabs of rock strewn in the river’s path and drifted timber hung up like spikes and claws—then all was black and slashing rain.
There was no stopping, no control. We slung helplessly into the mess ahead.
Aretha’s ragged voice reached me through the smashing water. “Hoss, what are you doing!”
“Nothing! I can’t do anything!”
Not until we were upon it did I see the first big pine snag, wedged between behemoth stones in the center current, its dead limbs whipping and shaking in the water’s frenzied onrush.
“Get down!” I roared at Aretha as we slid through a gap of air beneath the butt end of the snag.
A shattered branch-tip caught and snapped off in Aretha’s hair—she shrieked and smothered Sneed—and an instant later the same branch, trimmed to a lethal thickness, tore my hat off but left my head where it was. Lucky Dog.
Then we were clear of that snag and spinning into the next danger. In the following instant there came a stomach-dropping lunge—a roller coaster plunge, as if the river were inhaling us- and then the boat slammed a rock broadside and careened into a new tangle of water and wood.
We did not luck through this one. We slammed in between branches and stuck fast, pinned by a million pounds of water. We were allowed one full breath of sickening stasis. Then the current simply pried the boat up into a vertical ass-stand and hung us there.
Aretha shrieked like a threatened cat. She and Sneed came slopping down through the mash of spray and water and vibrating rubber and landed hard upon me. Aretha grabbed me around the neck. “Baby! Where’s my baby?” She wailed into my ear as the water levered us over into a full cartwheel. “Where is my baby?” she demanded.
But I felt the absence of Sneed as the boat flopped over us topside-down and darkened everything.
Flotsam
I fought my head outside the boat. Lightning struck the cliff ahead and gave me a glimpse of Sneed clutching at a rock as he was swept past just yards ahead.
“Sneedy! Turn around! Grab the boat!”
But the Roam shoved us both along, converging, separating, converging one last time before suddenly the boat hung up once more in timber. “Sneed!” I yelled as he spun away into froth and slashing rain.
I ducked under the boat into Aretha’s wail of terror. “He’s okay,” I lied. “He’s fine. Let’s get this thing flipped over. Hang on right here.”
I left her at the flapping upstream edge of our predicament and hand-over-handed along the gunwale rope. The upside-down prow had jammed flush against a thick snag. Heavy current bowed my back around the snag, swept my legs beneath it. All around me the river raged and tore and sucked, and under this pressure the boat jittered madly. But all was in stasis, stuck in a balance of tremendous forces. I was flotsam now, a driftwood stick, or a shred of pondweed, Aretha and I bot
h, and the boat, and we would stay right there, whipping and trailing in place until the river moved us along. We could be snagged there for hours, weeks, months. The levers of the river had locked. I had to unlock them.
“D’Ontay!”
“Stay there!”
“Where’s my baby?”
“Hang on!”
I tried to bend my stomach muscles against the current. I couldn’t. I tried to pull my legs through the rush of water to join the rest of my body on the upstream side of the log. I couldn’t.
Flotsam, Dog. Flotsam.
I had to use my puniness. I had to leverage my frailty, not fight it. Hand over hand, letting my body trail limply, I worked my way back up to Aretha. There I spanned my arms to grab the rope on both gunwales and added my weight to hers to pull the flapping stern down against the current. “Go down to the other end and hold on,” I rasped at Aretha. “No matter what. Hold on.”
When she was in place, I worked one arm free of the gunwale rope. That side of the boat bounced up in the current, caught air and nearly tore out my still-bound arm before I caught the rope in my free fist and yanked the boat down flush.
Slowly, fearing a broken back or worse, I worked the other arm out of its engagement with the rope. Now I was in the same position as my original hang-up, but I was holding the upside-down boat against the water—my grip and nothing else.
So there we were. I held the mighty lever. I checked Aretha. She held on at the downstream end. “Son of a bitch!” I screamed, and I thrust my arms up and let the boat go.
The boat lifted away in a backbend over the snag with Aretha scooped up inside while my body, now in free float, swept out beneath the log. I raked through underwater branches and popped up on the other side just as the boat sailed over me and splatted face-up, Aretha jumbled inside, on a short patch of fast, smooth water. In an instant, streaked by a sideways crackle of lightning, Aretha and the boat were gone, safely or not, downstream.
“Son of a bitch!” I screamed again, kicking with numb legs toward an eddy on the east canyon wall where Sneed floated face down.
This is the End of Us
So how come you’re not home with your wife?
A good, hard question. But just try me. The Dog doesn’t say much about the past. The Dog lives not to think about it, endeavors to fish hard, to drink hard, and to sleep like ancient mud. There exists, out there, an endlessly open tap of trout water, a cool and intoxicating wilderness of clear waters along blue highways. And when all this ceases to soothe me, there is always the Big Two-Hearted. But now and then memory does lay siege. And then God help me. I would, I could, do anything to fight back, to conquer the past. I would die. Of course I would. I would offer up myself.
“Can’t you hear me? Ned? Can’t you just respond?”
My sweet bride Mary Jane calls me from too far away in the house, a practice I abhor. Injured somehow, she has gone away to clatter in the kitchen and now she tests me, wanting me to follow, seeing if I won’t. I post a numb and angry won’t, vigorously thumbing a seam on the couch cushion and feeling trapped. What haven’t I done? What haven’t I provided? What demon has gotten in past my guard? What the hell is her problem?
The upstairs water has stopped some time ago. The pipes are silent in the wall behind me. I haven’t noticed.
It is April. Our fight is about her mother, and about my father, and about six red tulips. These are the coordinates.
Crime is up in Boston. My business is good. We have just upgraded to a three-story, turreted, nineteenth-century textile merchant’s mansion in West Newton. Her mother is sick with what turns out to be uterine cysts, painful but benign. My father, on the other hand, has been sick all his life in certain ways that a scrupulously fault-free girl like Mary Jane cannot reference.
“Ned, can’t you just respond to me? I’m asking you where is Eamon?”
Of course, I don’t like the tone. I post a silence, and one small, internal breakdown in diction: bitch.
Irate, slamming things, my wife repeats, “Ned, I’m asking you: where is Eamon?”
I wonder suddenly: when have the pipes stopped hissing and hammering in the wall? I have no idea. “He went up to take a bath.”
“By himself?”
“Yes.”
“And you think that’s a good idea?”
“Obviously, I do.”
“I can’t hear you. What did you say?”
I am too tired for this. “Come in here and talk to me. I don’t have to follow you around.” And here is the twist, the tangle that costs us. She arrives angrily. Returning to our original topic, I say, “I did what I thought was a good idea. Dad was happy with it, and your mother doesn’t really mind, she just talks, so what is the problem?”
Things mix up, but I don’t budge. What is the problem? If the water is off, then Eamon hasn’t overflowed the tub. What else is there to worry about? Tulips? Shall we worry about the six red tulips? Eamon is a smart kid. He’s a Manta Ray at swim lessons.
Now my wife steps in front of me, crosses her arms. Interrogation.
“He wanted to take a bath himself. He said he knew how.”
“And you think that’s a good idea?”
I say again, “Obviously I do.”
“He is four.”
“Yes he is.”
“Jesus, Ned.”
Mary Jane is just exactly the woman you would expect out of the Dog in those days. A tall blonde, angular and fragile beneath a big bust, the daily authoress of an edgy, clingy, classical beauty that can disappear in a flash. And I am just the man to match. I am a quivering side of corporate beef. I wear expensive suits. I work out and then afterwards I eat and drink too much. I just barely keep my pants on around the hotties on my office staff—all of them young women I’ve hired because I own the company, all of them young women who look like my wife before she became a mother. I am, as we sometimes say, a piece of work.
At home, ever wary, I have learned to read Mary Jane’s quicksilver moods like a seaman reads a barometer. I fix on the text of her face. I check it every minute, trying to spot harbingers of the change that could come any moment. Her brow and lips and skin tone, how much freedom her hair dares to assume—any of these can shift suddenly and spook me, summoning guilt and reparations on my part. A year or so later in my life, hearing of this kabuki-like arrangement, a shrink will paint a picture of yours truly in the image of a pet dog—and hence I name myself—a slave to the external, a creature eternally unsure from one moment to the next whether he is good or bad. Only later will I understand. Only later—too much later—will the Dog go bad, gloriously bad, snap the chain, and run.
But poor Mary Jane. Really. And poor me, too.
This isn’t what we need.
And lately I have had enough of her, enough of myself, and enough of us. I have begun to snarl. I can’t believe how stupid we are. I tell her, “I never meant to offend anybody—”
“Well, congratulations, Neddy. That’s quite an aspiration.”
“I don’t know where you get this shit.”
“I married it.”
“Jesus, Mary Jane. Settle down.”
“Those were my red tulips,” she storms. “I planted them in front of my house. I watered them. They complemented the color of the house. I did not want to cut them. It was a sacrifice.”
“But I heard you say about a hundred times, ‘Mother would so love these red tulips.’ Then my dad called. He didn’t know your mother was sick. I told him. He said, ‘Neddy, I’ll take her some flowers. What kind of flowers does she like?’ I remembered the red tulips, and that you said your mother would love them. Something clicks. I tell Dad, ‘Go to the florist and get some red tulips. M.J.’s mother loves red tulips.’ I thought it was a good idea.”
Mary Jane squeezes her narrow fists and interrupts me with a growling sound. Her hair has come undone and her hyper-sensitive skin has exploded in a rash below the jaw.
“Ned,” she said, “Ned, that is not a t
hought. That is, like, half a thought.”
“Why is it such a big deal?”
“Ned. Ned, don’t you see the sacrifice I’ve made here? For nothing? Thanks to you? Don’t you see that I cut my red tulips? The ones that I planted. That I watered. That I would have liked to keep in front of my house, where I planted them. That I cut anyway, to give to my mother, who is sick?” My wife stops herself. For an unconscious moment she is a human female gyroscope, centering her anxiety. Then she shrieks toward the ceiling, “Eamon! What are you doing? Are you okay? Eamon? Eamon, answer me!”
The Clinch Knot Page 19